Child Vulnerability (Public Services Committee Report)

Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts

Monday 11th July 2022 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top]

That this House takes note of the Report from the Public Services Committee Children in crisis: the role of public services in overcoming child vulnerability (1st Report, Session 2021-22, HL Paper 95).

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to introduce this report to the House before the Recess. The report makes it clear that the UK faces a crisis in child vulnerability. In England alone, over a million children are growing up with reduced life chances, and children paid a very heavy price during the pandemic. The national lockdowns, while necessary, had a severe impact on their education and their mental health. However, things were bad long before the outbreak of Covid-19. The last decade has seen our most disadvantaged children and young people being let down. We have seen cuts to early years and early intervention support, despite the raft of research which shows how important it is to a child’s long-term educational success and life chances, with rising child poverty, criminal exploitation and gang violence, while the gap in attainment at school between the richest and poorest children has continued to grow. Our children deserve better.

Spending on early help for families, such as Sure Start and children’s centres, family support and youth services, was cut by 48% between 2010-11 and 2019-20. Our report found that this had a devastating impact on communities across the country. In 2019, before the pandemic, the Office of the Children’s Commissioner for England estimated that 1.6 million children were living in homes with serious parental mental illness, addiction, domestic violence or other concerns, but found that support for these children was either patchy or non-existent. It also found that 829,000 of these children were completely invisible to services. This got worse over lockdown. This decimation of family support services has not only damaged the life chances of disadvantaged children but makes very little economic sense. If children and families are unable to access the support that they need when they need it, small problems can escalate into full-blown crises such as joining a gang, being expelled from school or ending up in care. As a result, councils have been forced to spend almost £2 billion a year more since 2010 on crisis management services such as youth justice services, safeguarding and looking after children in the social care system. Ironically, the decision by successive Governments to slash family support services has therefore resulted in an unprecedented increase in the role of the state in family life. In 2015, 69,000 children in England were in care, but by March 2020 the figure was 80,080.

Josh MacAlister, who gave evidence to our inquiry, warned in his recent Independent Review of Children’s Social Care that a failure to radically reset services for vulnerable children and families would lead to record numbers of children going into care. Research commissioned by the County Councils Network found that the number of looked-after children in England is likely to reach almost 100,000 before 2025 unless action is taken.

This growing crisis demands bold action. Therefore, I confess to being rather disappointed to receive such an uninspiring government response to our report. In fairness, the response did point to the Department for Education’s family hub programme, and additional funding for the early years and Supporting Families programme. We agree that these are steps in the right direction. Our report found that family hubs are an effective model for providing early help and supporting parents to meet their children’s needs. In the small number of areas where they have already been established, we saw how family hubs played an important role in improving early intervention support, in facilitating integration and data sharing among public services, and enabling voluntary sector partnerships.

Also, while most Sure Start centres offered services for children up to the age of only five, family hubs help parents with children up to the age of 19. That is undoubtedly the right approach. However, the money announced for the early years and family hubs to date nowhere near compensates for the £1.7 billion cut from Sure Start and other support since 2010. There are currently only 150 family hubs in England, and this falls far short of the vision put forward by Andrea Leadsom, the author of the Government’s early years review, that all families should be able to access a local hub in their community from pregnancy.

Our children and our country simply cannot afford for the Government to continue to underinvest in family support. This failed approach has undermined families’ resilience and made them more reliant on late, very costly intervention by the state, which is bad for children and, ultimately, bad for the taxpayer. That is why we need a radical new approach to early intervention. We need it for vulnerable families, not only to boost outcomes for children but to support families to be independent and to reduce costs in the criminal justice and social care system. We also need support for the estimated one in six children with unaddressed mental health needs, to ease pressure on the NHS.

During our inquiry, we were presented with a wealth of evidence from the Early Intervention Foundation and other organisations, as well as academics and researchers, about the impressive real-world impact that existing early intervention programmes already have on the lives of children. The Incredible Years programme has an impressive track record in improving cognitive outcomes for children. The Preparing for Life programme was found to narrow the disadvantage gap in school readiness. The recent evaluation of the Family Nurse Partnership programme demonstrates a significant impact on children’s health and education outcomes.

If the Government are serious about levelling up, this is where they should start. A national rollout of some of these programmes, delivered through a comprehensive family hub network, would unlock the full economic potential of our country. For too long, vulnerable children in our most disadvantaged areas have not been given that fair start, and research carried out by Pro Bono Economics on behalf of the committee found that cuts to early intervention have fallen most heavily on our poorest areas. Spending on early intervention in areas of England with the highest levels of child poverty was cut by £766 million between 2010 and 2019. It does not need to be like that. The London School of Economics estimated that the economic cost in a single year of failing to invest in the early years is over £16 billion. We must get our priorities right.

However, funding alone will not solve the child vulnerability crisis. Every relevant part of local and national government, the public and the voluntary sector must be mobilised if we are to tackle this once-in-a-generation challenge. That is why our report called for a national strategy on vulnerable children, with family hubs at its heart. The Government did not agree. They said that things are best done locally and of course I agree. None the less, we heard from several young people where there had not been the collective co-ordinated action from across public services that tackled the family problems, and it left them very vulnerable.

We fear that, without a national vision to bring together the NHS, police, social care, schools and the voluntary sector, or milestones and targets to hold Ministers and local services to account, little progress will be made to improve things for some of the most vulnerable children. I hope that the incoming Prime Minister, whoever that might be, and their Cabinet will take a different approach and make a strategy on child vulnerability a priority.

Any national strategy must also address data sharing. I think other colleagues from the committee will address this a little more than I have time for, but the Government ignored the evidence in their response on the grounds that data sharing is “already supported”—referring to requirements for safeguarding. The problem is that too many children do not quite reach the threshold for safeguarding, but services need to work with them so that they are not all missing out and falling through the gaps. The Information Commissioner acknowledged that there is a problem with existing data-sharing guidance on children, with too much emphasis placed on the risks to a child of sharing information with third parties, which disincentivises well-meaning front-line workers from sharing data that could improve a child’s outcomes. A clear strategy from the centre to ensure that the NHS, social care, schools, the police and other local services do not view each other as third parties is critical.

It is time that I finished. I thank everyone on the committee, which I have been incredibly lucky to chair. It has some great people. We lost some members, and I am delighted that a couple will contribute to the debate none the less. I must say that at least two of our members are not here and had to remove their names because they have Covid. It is a real problem in this House because we cannot have hybrid sittings anymore. We have not had a meeting of the committee in the last two months where somebody has not been missing with Covid.

I also thank the staff. We had Tristan Stubbs and Mark Hudson working with us, and Claire, our admin assistant. Tristan and Mark moved on as we were finishing this inquiry. We have two new people working with us, Sam Kenny and Tom Burke. They have all been really supportive and helpful in getting us this far. We keep coming back to some of the issues that were raised.

I also pay particular tribute to all the parents, children and young people who bravely shared their experiences with us. Vulnerable families still recovering from the impact of Covid on their education, mental health and personal finances now find themselves in the midst of the worst cost of living crisis in decades. All the pressures children face at home, as described in our report, such as witnessing parental domestic violence, addiction or mental ill-health, are likely to intensify in the coming months. If we do not act, the consequences for these children’s education, future employment prospects and life chances will be catastrophic. We cannot allow difficult times to distract us from this task at hand. If now is not the time to address the crisis facing vulnerable children, then when is it? I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for her responses. I was very relieved when I saw that she was to respond because I know, and have discussed with her, the work she did before she came to the House. I had an email today from SafeLives to make sure that I was aware of its points; I know that she will be too.

I thank everyone involved. I forgot to mention in my speech one person who helped us enormously through the report and the evidence taking. That was our specialist adviser, Anne Longfield, a previous Children’s Commissioner, so we had a lot of knowledge and a lot of challenge on how we were doing things, which was extremely useful. The House will recognise that I also had amazing people on the committee, and I was very confident that they would cover areas that I did not have time for in my speech. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Pitkeathley, for emphasising the voluntary sector and the voice of the child and the family. Throughout our inquiries, we have become convinced, if we were not before, that listening to and involving people with lived experience is critical to both design and delivery of services across the board, and children’s services are very much part of that. I am pleased that the Minister recognised that too.

The other issue is mental health, and I am very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Wyld, for spending some time on it. We will never be able to train the number of psychologists and psychiatrists in time to deliver what we all want to be delivered. That means that we must use the voluntary sector, which works at an earlier, less intensive level, so that, for those for whom problems can be contained before they reach the crisis level that the noble Baroness discussed, we can do so with many more people. I know from other work I am doing at the moment that many young people are involved in what can only be called psychotic behaviour and need very specialist attention.

I was also grateful to the right reverend Prelate for his contribution—not as a member of the committee, but if he is interested; we are always interested in the Bishops’ Bench. He was able to talk about somewhere that my noble friend Lady Chapman and I both know very well: Grangetown. I visited that Sure Start centre myself. It was always so great to visit, because there was so much energy, commitment and determination to make things better. I thank him for his contribution.

There are so many issues here but there is unanimity around the House that this is a crisis and an issue that we have not got right—although there are examples of where we can get it right. This is not about saying, “We don’t know what to do”. The reality is that we know what to do. There are examples out there showing us that, with the right sort of support at the right time, things can be different in every community. I am sorry that my noble friend the Whip—the noble Baroness, Lady Blake—has left because she was the leader of Leeds City Council when, despite all the cutbacks, it managed to maintain its investment in Sure Start and children’s centres across the city. While everyone else was seeing the number of children going into care rise, Leeds saw a fall. We know what to do. The challenge for the Government is making sure that they pull together that knowledge and implement it. I thank everyone for a really interesting debate.

Motion agreed.